Man, Oh, Manischewitz!

The hottest new varietal is moscato:

In the opening to the video to his new single, “Country Ass Nigga,” Nelly takes a healthy slug from a wine bottle, grimaces ever so slightly, and wipes his upper lip clean as he savors the fruit-juicey kiss of the first rapper-branded Moscato (“Freaky Muscato,” marketed by his hometown crew, the St. Lunatics). Moscato, if you didn’t know, is a white-wine varietal, and Mr. Hot in Herre isn’t its only notable partisan in the hip-hop firmament; it’s also been extolled by Drake, Soulja Boy, and Gucci Mane. Those plugs have accelerated a full-blown Moscato boom: According to Nielsen, sales grew about 73 percent in 2011 after doubling the previous year. It is the fastest-growing varietal in California — E.&J. Gallo, California’s top bulk winery, has introduced five new Moscato products over the last two years. Growers in California have been frantically planting Muscat grapes (the kind used in Moscato) to keep up with demand, marking the first known occasion in which rap has directly affected the biosphere.

The whole thing sort of reminds me of Manischewitz’s 1960s-1970s ad campaigns that targeted novice or beginning wine drinkers. (You can see tons of them at the National Jewish Archive of Broadcasting at the Jewish Museum; they’re a hoot.) Check out this one of Sammy Davis, Jr., for example:

Now if Gallo used Nelly as a spokesperson, the wine and spirits industry can finally atone for the sins of the Cristal people.

Proving Yet Again That Money Can’t Buy Taste, By Which They Mean It Literally Can’t Buy Taste

Alex Halberstadt extracts some great stories from Manhattan sommeliers for The Faster Times:

After two gangsterish Russians downed several thousand-dollar bottles of champagne, they switched to ’89 Mouton Rothschild, just under $2K per bottle. They emptied one bottle, then another; when I opened a third I realized it was corked. I had more of the wine downstairs and when I headed there one of the men barked at me and demanded to taste from the bottle in my hands. I explained that it was corked, but either he didn’t follow my English or didn’t know what “corked” meant. He sipped the wine and smiled. “The best one yet,” he declared. “The others were too fruity.”

(More, please — these stories are awesome . . .)

Sherry Followup From A Fellow Tippler

Apropos of our recent sherry tasting, Humpday Tippler Craig passes along this field report . . .

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After indulging in seven sherries at the Humpday Tipplers club last week, I was inspired to break out a bottle of special sherry I had been saving — Alvear Fino Montilla:

I bought it a few months ago at Astor Wine after finally spending some time in their extensive sherry section. In Granada earlier this year we tasted a lot of sherries, but we were too busy enjoying the free tapas to take notes or pay too close attention to the details of the nose, taste, etc. It tasted good and went great with food, so that’s all we needed to know. Plus, at 1.20 Euro a glass it’s easy to get a little drunkypants, so who has time to keep track of how it feels on your palate? Here’s some tapas of tiny omelets with a couple of glasses of sherry at Bodegas Espadafor in Granada:

But after tasting the whole range of sherries from Fino to Amontillado to Oloroso at the Humpday survey, my palate is much more tuned in to the subtleties of this excellent drink. The Alvear Fino Montilla from Astor was crisp and extremely dry like most Finos with a very quick finish. It had a fruity aroma with a hint of funkiness. It was a little different than anything we tried with the club, it but still had that distinctive Fino essence. And as an aperitif, it was perfect with a few bites of Marcona almonds, olives, and cheese.

So I’m officially sold on sherry. From now on our bar will always be stocked with a bottle of top quality sherry at all times. You never know when that tapas craving will hit.

–CN

Humpday Sherry

Only vaguely familiar with Harvey’s Bristol Cream, I was skeptical of how our sherry tasting would turn out. My interest was piqued when Jen said that it was a wine that had a lot of enthusiastic fans and that restaurants have been adding sherry to wine lists, but I can’t say I was completely converted by the end of the evening. I probably had some preconceptions that it would all taste like raisins, but only one really had a raisin-y quality — the Lustau Pedro Ximénez, which was the sweetest sherry we tried. This Humpday definitely changed my general perception of sherry, so it was successful in that respect.

To me, tasting sherry is different than tasting wine. First off, swirling it in the glass doesn’t seem to do much beyond releasing the extra alcohol in the wine — after all, this is basically fortified hooch. In that sense it seemed like tasting spirits to me — you don’t swirl tequila because you’ll just get a big whiff of alcohol. The tasting part was strange, too — for me, each of the lighter sherries had a big almost grappa-like quality to them, followed by a finish of nuttiness and in one case (the Alvear Asuncion Oloroso Sherry) a distinct maple taste. It was fascinating, but so different than most wine, which to me tastes more balanced from beginning to end. Some of the sherries seemed to “settle down” on subsequent days, losing some of the grappa taste.

I spent a lot of time on the food, hoping that we’d get it right — sherry seemed like it would need more thought than, say, a steak and Cabernet required. The pairings were definitely interesting, and some of it was really good (not my doing — I just tried to follow different recommendations), but I still can’t see ordering a sherry with a main course. I’d of course try some more sherries — maybe we just didn’t get the right ones for me.

Humpday Cabernet Franc

The Cabernet Franc Humpday Tipple is up. As fans of New York wines — both in the Finger Lakes and on Long Island, we were looking forward to this Tipple and sorry to say, we had some disappointment. Jen writes: “Why were we less than enthusiastic? Are we just barbarians, or was there really something missing?”

After initially being really underwhelmed by Cabernet Franc, over the years we’ve noticed more and more good examples of the varietal. Jen, Michael and I went to WD-50 a few years ago and enjoyed a Finger Lakes Cabernet Franc from Miles Wine Cellars, which we were familiar with, having visited there in 2006. This past March we tried several really good Cabernet Francs from Napa — Trespass Vineyards stands out as one of the best I’ve ever tasted. It’s a cool wine when it’s done well.

When Cabernet Franc is not done well, however, it is kind of gross. One of the earliest lessons I learned about viticulture came in 2005 when we first visited Long Island and tried many examples of Cabernet Franc. Place after place we kept noticing this bell pepper taste (and sometimes a rubbery taste). I innocently kept saying, “oh, it tastes like bell pepper!” and it wasn’t until later that we learned that the taste of bell pepper comes out when grapes are underripe — usually the sign of a rainy growing season. We left Long Island thinking we didn’t like Cabernet Franc, then we tasted the good ones in the Finger Lakes and then Napa — since then it’s been a grape we’ve sought out.

I was definitely looking forward to trying the French Cabernet Francs and I have to say that I was really disappointed in the “thinness” (as Jen writes) of the Chinon. Elsewhere, the Schneider Cabernet Franc from Long Island just reeked of rubber. The one fantastic wine we tried was the Anjou Pur Breton Cousin-Leduc 2006 from the Loire Valley in France — the normally quiet clerk at Astor got really excited when I asked where to find this bottle and it was as advertised — really wonderful stuff (the “naturalness” of the wine is great, too).

Now I should add, to be fair, that some of these wines tasted a lot better the next day. Sometimes red wine leftovers don’t taste real great the next day, but some of the wines that didn’t taste real great on Humpday actually tasted OK on Thursday and Friday. Not sure why this would be, but I’m passing it along.

Until next time . . .